Summer Internship is one of the most integral part of a management course and coming from an engineering background, it was even more important for me. It was an opportunity for me to work in the domain I wanted to pursue after my PGDM and get a taste of the work I could expect during my job and most importantly learn as much I could about the sector/domain. Having completed a couple of Live Projects in marketing and sales during my first year, I was very clear in my mind that Sales is not my cup of tea. So, I decided to switch over to operations and for once decided to go for something which interested me, rather than going for something which could fetch me a good placement package.
I then applied for an Operations Intern role at Future Retail Limited and got the internship. Once the internship was confirmed, I started preparing for the internship based on the project that I was offered which was Order Management and Industry Benchmarking. Retail and Supply Chain were totally new to me and I knew a lot of work had to be done to be ready for the internship. Some part of supply chain and inventory management I studied as a part of my curriculum and to take it up a notch higher I started reading articles and study materials online. In the next 4-5 months I made sure I read at least one article daily and took up a few courses on Udemy to understand the minute intricacies. Meanwhile I also got in touch with some of the previous interns of the company to get some idea on the nature of the work and the work culture of the organization.
By, 1st of April,2019, the day when my internship was bound to start, I was confident and knew that with a bit of guidance and support I would be able to learn and perform well in my internship. The internship started with a two-day induction program at the Future Retail Head Office, Vikhroli, Mumbai, where all the interns were briefed about the company and the work culture. I was surprised to know the number of brands that future group owned and the number of sectors and categories it was already present in. After the induction I was aligned with Madhusudan Sir in the Retail team. For the first 10 days I was asked to understand the way Inventory replenishment system worked at the Future Group. I was introduced to a lot of new terminologies and few processes which were being followed in the company. Within the first week itself I had got a fair idea of the entire distribution system and how we were replenishing the stocks across all the stores in India.
The first work that was assigned to me by mentor was to understand the current forecasting technique being followed in the company and suggest ways or method to further reduce the forecast error. I worked on this for couple of weeks with one of my team members, Rathi Srinivas. While analyzing the data I found some very interesting patterns in the sales of certain SKUs across the week and year. Analyzing the reasons behind such pattern, I understood a lot about the buying patterns and stimuli of Indian consumers and the factors which drive the Indian consumers to buy.
After this, at the start of second month I was assigned another project, which was to develop a tool for analysis of stock outs at the stores, which helped me explore new dimensions and was one of my major takeaways from my internship. This tested my analytical, logical and reasoning acumen to a great extent. With excels files containing lakhs of rows and more lakhs getting added every day, I was a bit bamboozled at the start looking at the amount of data I had to first streamline for analysis. It was tough for both, me as well as for my laptop to process this much amount of data and it took several shutdowns and restarts for us to get in the groove. For the next 3 weeks I worked extensively on developing a tool which could tell the possible reasons why a SKU was stocked at a store. By the last week of my internship I had successfully developed a tool to analyze the stock out and concluded my internship with a presentation to my mentor and team. My work was greatly admired, and I knew I was had delivered something which has added a great value to the team and something which has created an impact. The amount of learning I was taking from my 2 months was incomparable and I knew I had to leverage this going forward. Today when I have started my second year and I sit in supply chain and retail management classes, I realize the importance of those 2 months, when everything being taught seems relatable and hence becomes easy to comprehend.
I owe a lot to my mentor and my team. It was the best team I have worked with. Everyone was always ready and available to help with even slightest of the doubts. The fact that a person who was completely new to the industry was able to understand the nuances of the sector and was able to develop a tool, speaks volume of the support and assistance I got from my team and mentor. My mentor Madhusudan Sir is one of the most sought-after professionals I have ever met. Even though he was heading the Retail, he made sure he took out time each day to check how I was progressing, explained the concepts to me and solved my problems as well.
My internship was one of the most memorable period of my life where not only I learnt a lot , but those two months in Mumbai, the everyday local train travels during the busiest hours, made me realize that nothing comes easy in life and taught me the importance of staying humble and grounded.